When you read TSLAC’s local government retention schedules (“local schedules”), you may notice the word “obsolete” pops up in lots of different places. Some folks ask us what we mean when we say obsolete. Obsolete generally refers to a record that is no longer active. How your records management program must treat an obsolete record…
I am not a naturally organized person. Last weekend, my husband watched me paw through a laundry basket of essentially all black clothes looking for a black tank top and the two I came up with weren’t the right one. But I have to be organized at work, because others need to find things quickly…
Last year, we were invited to participate in the Juvenile Records Advisory Committee (JRAC), a group composed of prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, court staff, probation officials, and others who are experts in the field of law, especially focused on juveniles in the court system. Our goal was to rewrite Chapter 58 of Texas Family Code,…
We know how to dispose of paper records. You can either destroy the records by burning or shredding them. Although these methods of destroying records may have been a viable option in the past, these same methods might not be enough to remove all traces of data from records being stored electronically. Before destroying an electronic…
The time has come to declutter your home and save space while protecting your information. Best of all, it’s FREE! Did you know, at most, you only need to hold onto past tax returns documents for 7 years after initial filing? If you have confidential paper documents, or even just boxes and boxes of non-confidential information,…
Texas law authorizes state agencies and local governments in compliance to disposition a record under two conditions: (1) the record belongs to a record series on an approved records retention schedule and (2) its retention period has expired (Government Code §441.187; Local Government Records Act §202.001). As part of disposition, all Texas governments must use…
This is the first post of a multi-part recap of the 2014 e-Records Conference. Presentation materials from the e-Records Conference are coming soon to the e-Records 2014 website. By Bret Adams, Government Information Analyst Okay, so if you didn’t attend e-Records 2014 — or if you happened to succumb to the common afternoon tendency to…
This is a part of a series of recaps from the 2014 National Conference on Managing Electronic Records, otherwise known as the MER Conference. Jason Baron, Esq. and Jay Brudz, Esq., who work in the Information Governance and eDiscovery Group of Drinker Biddle & Reath, LLP, gave a joint presentation about how information governance (IG)…